Sunday, June 14, 2009

Thanks to its meteoric rise and adoption by celebrities, Twitter has come to represent the latest bright spot in the world of social networking - but anyone thinking they'd heard it all before with Friendster, MySpace and Facebook might be surprised to hear that the service could be more different than they think.

The study looks at a fairly large sample of Twitter accounts (more than 300,000 randomly chosen users, the researchers tell us) and comes up with some intriguing findings. The first is that 80% are actually part of the social network have followed somebody else, or are being followed (which means, on the flip side, that 20% of accounts have never actually been used – it turns out that is still a marked improvement on most social sites).

However, it's the questions of gender balance that are really mind boggling – with numbers indicating that Twitter is a much more masculine affair than other social networks, which are primarily driven by female users.

According to researchers Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, they discovered, when examining a smaller subset of 40,000 users whose gender was determined, that:

- Men have, on average, more followers than women- Men are almost twice as likely to follow other men than they are women- Women are also more likely to follow men

That's despite 55% of users on Twitter being women.

Most social networks are driven, to some extent, by a honeypot effect – where women tend to post lots of material like photos and videos, and gather disproportionate numbers of male friends and fans as a result (at its extreme, this has developed into a string of female web "personalities" like, say, Justine Ezarik).

On typical social networks this means women lead the conversation, men simply tag along for the ride. But on Twitter, that's not the case. Why? Perhaps, say the researchers, Twitter's basic approach limits the honeypot temptations:

We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.)

You could also speculate that the lower-level informational transactions of Twitter - fast, short, to the point - are more traditionally masculine than the interactive, contextual sharing done on other networks.

Whatever the reasons are, seeing a different gender bias emerge means that - despite being lumped into the same bucket on many occasions - not all social networks are equal.

And while some may lament the fact that the next big thing online is male dominated, I'm quite happy to see a move away from the slightly voyeuristic nature of the honeypot web. I wonder what it would take to achieve a neutrally-gendered network?